100 LIft Your Legs, and Spirits .. .... When I received our first footrest it kept disappearing from under my desk. Everybody was fighting for it. Once you try it, you'll see how it makes your legs feel weightless. It instantly takes pressure off the undersides of your legs and lower back. I t rocks, too, helplng your circulation even more. It's amazing how much this small devlce can Improve your ! outlook Made of t '/ solid ash, inlaid with fine rubber tile. $39.95 + $5.95 shipping via UPS ground (Call for pricing on six or more) MC/VISA/AMEXICheck. Florida add 60/0 Money- Back Guarantee · Catalog on Request 800-544-0880 or 407-276-4141 LEVENGER TOOLS FOR SERIOUS READERS 975 S. Congress Ave., Code NYFP4, Delray, FL 33445 . KS I N TAPE O co World's Largest SelectIon of AudIo Books Lt:) (C C'.I \\\\I\lS C) · Best Sellers < I u ..c on Cassette ::D u CD C'C:I CQ Q) c:: c:a 1: (\ · Full-length S:n 0 .. )- "'tJ c.. ) .. :c Rentals Q) Qo Z :-4 z: 3: <<6 IU\U1 \mt · Call for Free 0 CI Brochure I >< 0 c:a (800) 626-3333 '"' . f_ 'Thinking of an Old Friend".?" Why Not Get Back In Touch! $40 starts the search Another $40 IS paid only If we find your friend. Call for a free Information Kit. Old Friends Information Services P.o. Box 13314, Suite 640 Oakland, CA 94661 800/841-7938 MAY 18,1992 as everyone around him was, Nijinsky's sexual compromise was his own choice, and it is one that many young men have made with no unhappy conse- quences, let alone madness. Which is not to say that in his case it wasn't psychologically damaging Nijinsky taps into a final myth-that of the genius-madman. He was tagged with this label long before he went mad, just on the basis of the contrast between his ons,tage mastery and his offstage ineptitude. Diaghilev's friend Misia Sert called Nijinsky an "idiot of genius." And after he went insane the formula was pumped for all it was worth. Some writers described him as an avatar of the Russian yurodivy, or "holy fool"-the man who, like Dostoyevski's Prince M yshkin, is in- competent in life because his vision of divine truth is too clear. Others in- voked the moth-to-the-flame metaphor: Nijinsky was a man who tested the limits-in dancing, in choreography, in sex-and paid the price; he went farther out on the limb than the rest of us, and fell off; he died for our sins. (The shadow of Christ hovers at the edge of all these images.) As with van Gogh, the metaphor is reflexive: he went mad because he was a great artist, and he was a great artist because he went mad. The realities of Nijinsky's insanity make these romantic notions seem less inviting. The helpless little man whom Ostwald describes, falling asleep with his face in his food dish, is hard to square with the Promethean image of the genius-madman. And Nijinsky was a strange person long before he tested any limits. The peculiarities that he showed in his late twenties, when he did things like walking offstage in the middle of a performance, are generally interpreted by later commentators as evidence that he was going mad under the pressure of events. But, as Ostwald managed to discover somewhere in the depths of a Russian library, Nijinsky was doing exactly the same thing at eighteen: "During a performance of Swan Lake on 25 November 1907, he became so flustered that he stopped dancing his variation of the pas de trois in the first act and began taking his bows while the orchestra was still playing." Nobody called him a mad genius then. He got an official rebuke from the director of the theatre. Though Ostwald cannot, and does not, say for certain that Nijinsky's illness was biologically based, he produces plenti- ful evidence that the dancer was un- stable from childhood. (Robert Craft has written that Stravinsky had some information about "Nijinsky's heredi- tary syphilis," but Ostwald says syphi- lis was ruled out by repeated hospital tests. ) Still, it is possible that there was some connection between Nijinsky's insanity and what was apparently his genius, particularly as a choreogra- pher. Great leaps of thought may occur more easily in a brain that has some neurological idiosyncrasy. What did it take to imagine, as Einstein did, that matter and energy were convertible into one another? What did it take for a twenty-two-year-old who had never before made a professional ballet to imagine that his meanings should be conveyed not by the methods in which he had been trained since childhood- dancing to the music, producing the rounded, three-dimensional shapes of academic ballet-but by having the d " h h " h .. ancers move t roug t e mUSIC In flattened profile, gliding in lateral lines, like ducks in a shooting gallery? Pre- sumably, modernism had to hit ballet eventually, but it is strange that the medium was an artist who-unlike Stravinsky or Picasso, for example- never went through a conservative apprenticeship, never had an "early period," in which he mastered the style of his teachers before discarding it. In one stroke, his first stroke, he threw away the very grounds of his prior experience, the grounds of his thought. To do such a thing, a slightly unusual neurological hookup is perhaps not required, but it might help. Whatever it took-that was the basis on which Nijinsky constructed "L' Après- Midi d'un Faune." And today, after what is probably considerable erosion of its original choreography, the ballet still carries a huge force: its rigors, its analytic coldness, its sheer, unromantic wit, perfectly poised against the warm upwelling of its meaning-the sum- mer afternoon, the naked nymph, the faun's sudden knowledge of sex. If this is all we have left by way of art to anchor Nijinsky's legend, it is enough. - JOAN ACOCELLA ,. . (28) FRUGAL GOURMET (CC) 72988 Pasta recipes include pasta with peanut but- ter, spaghetti with sand, and green fettucine with duck sauce.- TV Guide. Frugal, all right.